Wayne Mellinger

“To bear witness to injustice is to tell a story about our world based upon firsthand observation of real-life circumstance, fueled by moral outrage, concerned for the common good and promoting social change.

When our stories provide a sense of history, social responsibility and concern for the common good, they can foster a democracy rooted in the public interest and promote a society that embraces an inclusive social contract.

We must make hope possible. The goal is to change things, to remove a bit of the unnecessary suffering of our world, to create what Martin Luther King referred to as “the Beloved Community.”

We must believe that we can make a difference. To change the “system” necessitates a change of will in which we acknowledge our complicity with the status quo and decide to no longer silently go along with the way things are.

Instead, we decide to live our values, speak our truth and do what must be done.”
― Wayne Mellinger, "Bearing Witness As a Spiritual Practice"

“Develop healthy intimacy that is not clingy or detached. Find people to love who can also love you. Collect supportive friends who are kind, will listen to you and who you can trust. These are rare items indeed. Develop a diverse network of people at all stages and levels of society. These others expand your universe and may have knowledge you need for the good life.”
― Wayne Mellinger, "How to Achieve the Good Life"

“Being poor does not make people homeless, but being very poor where housing is unaffordable does. By expanding the amount of affordable housing in our community we address a central root cause of homelessness.

Only when our community has the amount of affordable housing we need will we come close to ending homelessness.”
― Wayne Mellinger, "A Marshall Plan to Build Affordable Housing in Santa Barbara County"

“[T]o develop a deep ecological consciousness we can change the way we see the world.

First, we need to see that humans are a part of nature, embedded within the interdependent web of existence. Second, we need to eliminate the anthropocentrism, or human-centered thinking, so prevalent in modernity. It is not all about us humans.

And finally, the re-sacralization of Nature could be an important change in our modern worldview, reaffirming the importance of the natural world, increasing our ecological consciousness, and promoting an ethic of care in which we treat Nature with reverence and respect.

Through appreciative attention to the concrete particularities of our local environments we can foster experiences of the sacred in nature.

As we awaken to our connections to the world in which we live, and come to see that world as filled with spiritual significance, this can amount to a radical paradigm shift in which a deep ecological consciousness transforms our everyday actions and our relationship to the natural world”
― Wayne Mellinger, "How to Achieve the Good Life"How You See the World Can Help You Develop Ecological